Paths of Judgement

untry solicitor, who, through a combination of happy inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an heiress of good family. Their wea

s disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed,

ermination, the mother's nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took their place among the more tawdry great n

elled with her husband to the verge of open rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open scandal, and written a flimsy political novel

later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She could never bear to look in

nded from the first Lord Glaston, and connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the

ree generations of simple and dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears, had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high places, and when, with not un

cles of the Church he belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of thinking about them-they we

sufficient for his lesser charities. His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question w

whim when men of ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among them;-what difference did the lamp make that h

sis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though very tender towards h

, grew white. "It shouldn't have happened had

hat it cost us to make you?-cost me, rather, for I did it all. Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every stick and stave I pos

uld rather have taken longer. I will pay off th

er with the cold depth characteristic of him, he regained in a moment the decorous kindness d

op-gap reading for the Bar, entered Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves

nd repute, she never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all her energies in the rapacities

ial failure, Mrs. Daun

la could not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this

iments towards this significant young relative, "I don't like her. She i

blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela's fortune to back him, Geoffrey's

offrey's, who had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was

ertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let them see that

ifference that was not at all assumed. Ingrained in Geoffrey's nature was the sense that power was his, and that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet t

he quite owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision

h. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor sentimen

but he suspected the little animal underneath of even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal, most exquisitely furbelowed-he granted her

and Maurice had little in common. Art was Maurice's object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not alto

dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the world. He was glad of the restful week